Fast fashion
Fast fashion is the business model of replicating recent catwalk trends and high-fashion designs, mass-producing them at a low cost, and bringing them to retail quickly while demand is at its highest. The term fast fashion is also used generically to describe the products of this business model, particularly clothing and footwear. Retailers who employ the fast fashion strategy include Fashion Nova, Primark, H&M, Shein, and Zara, all of which have become large multinationals by driving high turnover of inexpensive seasonal and trendy clothing that appeals to fashion-conscious consumers.
Fast fashion grew during the late 20th century as manufacturing of clothing became less expensive—the result of more efficient supply chains, new quick response manufacturing methods, and greater reliance on low-cost labor from the apparel manufacturing industries of South, Southeast, and East Asia, where women make up 85–90% of the garment workforce. Labor practices in fast fashion are often exploitative, and due to the gender concentration of the garment industry, women are more vulnerable. Outsourcing production to low-wage countries perpetuates cycles of dependence and inequality, echoing historical colonial economic exploitation patterns. In the US, the Design Piracy Prohibition Act was established to protect the designs of fashion designers. Numerous designers continue to sue fast fashion companies for copying their designs.
Fast fashion's environmental impact has also been the subject of controversy. The global fashion industry is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions per year, to which fast fashion is a large contributor. The low cost of production, favoring synthetic materials, chemicals, and minimal pollution abatement measures have led to excess waste.
Origins
Before the 19th century, fashion was a laborious, time-consuming process that required sourcing raw materials like wool, cotton, or leather, weaving the natural fibers into fabric, and then fashioning the fabric into functional garments. However, the Industrial Revolution changed the world of fashion by introducing new technology like the sewing machine and textile machines.As a result, clothes became cheaper and easier to make and buy. Meanwhile, localized dressmaking businesses emerged, catering to members of the middle class, and employing workroom employees along with garment workers, who worked from home for meager wages. These dress shops were early prototypes of the so-called ‘sweatshops’ that would become the foundation for twenty-first-century clothing production.
The Cosmopolitan journalist Lauren Bravo sees fast fashion stretching back to utility clothing and tailors who sold mass-produced affordable suits for men. In the 1960s companies like Inditex and Chelsea Girl attained commercial acumen, but the brand Biba endured as a fast fashion icon.
Before the popularization of the fast fashion model, the fashion industry traditionally operated on a four-season cycle, with designers working months in advance to anticipate customer preferences. However, this approach underwent a significant transformation in the 1960s and 1970s, as the younger generations began to create new trends. During this period there was still a clear distinction between luxury goods and high street fashion.
However, in the 21st century mass consumption of clothing increased dramatically. Globally, 80 billion pieces of new clothing are purchased each year, translating to $1.2 trillion annually for the global fashion industry. Approximately 85% of the clothing Americans consume, nearly 3.8 billion pounds annually, is sent to landfills as solid waste, amounting to nearly 80 pounds per American per year.
Significant companies
Zara
The origins of the fast fashion phenomenon involve several key players, rather than a single brand or company. One influential figure in this movement was Amancio Ortega, the founder of Zara. Established in 1963 in Galicia, Spain, Zara gained prominence by offering affordable imitations of high-end fashion trends alongside its original designs. In 1975, Ortega opened the first European retail outlet for his collections, pioneering his short-term production and distribution model. By the early 1990s, he had expanded to New York, and the New York Times coined the term fast fashion to describe Zara's business model, highlighting its ability to bring a designer's idea to store shelves in as soon as 15 days.Fast fashion retailers such as Zara, H&M, Topshop, and, Primark emerged as prominent brands in the high street fashion scene. Initially starting as small stores located across Europe, they were able to quickly gain prominence in the U.S. fashion market by replicating designs from runway shows and fashion houses and quickly reproducing them at a fraction of the cost.
In their 2008 article "Fast Fashion Lessons," Donald Sull and Stefano Turconi studied how Zara revolutionized the fast fashion industry. They attributed the company's success to its strategic supply chain and production network where Zara maintained complicated and capital-intensive operations in-house, and outsourced more labor-intensive operations, such as garment sewing, to a network of local subcontractors and seamstress operatives based in Galicia.
With shorter lead times, the company was able to respond rapidly to fluctuating demand by swiftly halting production of low-demand items and creating a sense of urgency for consumers to purchase in-demand clothing due to the ever-changing layout and stock of its stores. Items in the store may not be in stock during subsequent visits, prompting consumers to make immediate purchases if they wish to remain on-trend. The clothing is then only worn a few times before it is no longer in style, creating the need to constantly return to the store and buy new, trending items cheaply.
H&M
The origin story of H&M, another fast fashion giant, shares common threads with Zara. In 1946, Erling Persson, a Swedish entrepreneur, traveled to New York City, where he was greatly intrigued and impressed by the high-volume fashion production he witnessed. The following year, Persson established a womenswear store called Hennes & Mauritz in Västerås, Sweden. Between 1960 and 1979, the company rapidly expanded, with 42 stores across Europe, and began producing clothing for women, men, and children.The foundation for expansion into the global market was laid in the 1980s when H&M acquired Rowells, a Swedish mail order company, and used its networks to sell fast fashion by catalog and mail order. In the 1990s, H&M invested in large city billboard advertising, featuring celebrities and supermodels. H&M opened its flagship U.S. store on Fifth Avenue in New York City in 2000, marking the commencement of its expansion outside of Europe.
Shein
Originating in Nanjing, China, in 2008, by entrepreneur Chris Xu to sell online wedding dresses, Shein quickly became a global online-only fashion company. In 2020, it made 10 billion dollars, and in 2022, it made one hundred billion dollars. Through the COVID-19 pandemic, Shein saw a spike in sales with its market share overtaking competitors like H&M and Zara.Shein's business model is similar to Amazon’s, collaborating with thousands of third-party suppliers in China, Brazil, and Turkey in manufacturing and shipping their clothing to centralised warehouses, where they are then shipped to customers. Shein also uses a similar model to H&M and Zara for the production of new products, named "test and repeat", wherein suppliers produce 100 to 200 new pieces, then increase production of best-selling items. Their factories stretch across China with 6,000 different small factories under the Shein name. To advertise their brand, Shein uses TV stars like Khloé Kardashian and influencers on platforms like Instagram.
Concept
Fast fashion brands produce pieces to get the newest style on the market as soon as possible. They emphasize optimizing certain aspects of the supply chain for the trends to be designed and manufactured quickly and inexpensively and allow the mainstream consumer to buy current clothing styles at a lower price. This philosophy of quick manufacturing at an affordable price is used in large retailers such as SHEIN, H&M, Zara, C&A, Peacocks, Primark, ASOS, Forever 21, and Uniqlo.These retailers produce and sell products in small batches, keep surplus manufacturing capacity on hand, and frequently induce items to be out of stock, a practice designed to give retailers the ability to make substantial and immediate adjustments to manufacturing. For example, up to 85% of Zara's merchandise can be changed in the middle of the season: A fast fashion system like Zara's can quickly update designs, resulting in short product cycles where a garment does not sit on the stores' shelf for long periods, giving the store a sense of exclusivity and raising the attractiveness of an item.
Fast fashion particularly came to the fore during the vogue for "boho chic" in the mid-2000s. According to the UK Environmental Audit Committee's report "Fixing Fashion", the practice "involves increased numbers of new fashion collections every year, quick turnarounds and often lower prices. Reacting rapidly to offer new products to meet consumer demand is crucial to this business model."
Fast fashion has developed from a product-driven concept based on a manufacturing model referred to as "quick response" developed in the U.S. in the 1980s and moved to a market-based model of "fast fashion" in the late 1990s and the early 21st century. The Zara brand name has become almost synonymous with the term, but other retailers worked with the concept before the label was applied, such as Benetton. Fast fashion has also become associated with disposable fashion because it has delivered designer products to a mass market at relatively low prices.
The advancement of technology has allowed fast fashion to gain popularity over the last decade. Technology has allowed designers to create specifically what their consumers want according to what is "in" at the given moment. Every month, new things are trending and are displayed in stores to market towards youth.